Article 2. (Supplement) Creedalism Apart from Conciliarism Leads Only to Confusion

Article 2 Supplement

Note: Throughout our commentary of the Jerusalem Declaration we have affirmed its hermeneutic. In Supplemental Essays, we offer individual perspectives on how to apply these principles we seek to promote across the Communion.”

Article 2 Commentary: The Holy Scriptures

By The Rev. Ron Offringa

We have in Article Two laid out the hermeneutical principles of the Jerusalem Declaration. These principles, however, are made all the more clear and their import understood when we apply them to specific issues facing our Communion. In our commentary on the First Article we identified the need for repentance from error, not just for those who have not believed the Gospel of God, but for those within our Communion who have unknowingly fallen into error. Herein we aim to identify some of these errors, particularly regarding the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and how they are overcome by our adherence to the hermeneutic of the Jerusalem Declaration, itself merely a reiteration of a Catholic^[1] approach to Scripture.

Assumptions About the Creeds

It is often assumed that a bare Creedalism is sufficient to guard the deposit of faith. A step above “No Creed but the Bible,” some assert that “As long as we can hold to the Creeds, we remain within the bounds of Christianity.” This salvo is subject to two errors.

First, it assumes that the Creeds are an attempt to articulate the fullness of the faith. The Creeds are indeed intended to guard the fullness of faith against specific errors that damage or detract from it, but they are not meant to state the whole faith comprehensively. As St. Hilary reminds us,

“The errors of heretics and blasphemers force us to deal with unlawful matters, to scale perilous heights, to speak unutterable words, to trespass on forbidden ground. Faith ought in silence to fulfil the commandments, worshipping the Father, reverencing with Him the Son, abounding in the Holy Ghost, but we must strain the poor resources of our language to express thoughts too great for words. The error of others compels us to err in daring to embody in human terms truths which ought to be hidden in the silent veneration of the heart.”^[2]

We see this evidenced in the Creed which we call Nicene, which is more accurately titled the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. The original Creed of Nicaea was written in response to the blasphemies of Arius, who taught that the Son was a creature of the Father. The Nicene Fathers responded to this error in great detail, but when commenting on the third Person of the Trinity said only, “And in the Holy Ghost.” This was not because the Church merely acknowledges the existence of the Spirit, but because he was not the subject in question. As St. Anselm testifies, “we know that the creed has not expressed everything that we ought to believe and profess, nor did those who prescribed the creed wish that the Christian faith be content to believe and profess the things that the creed posited. For example, not to mention other things, the creed does not say that the Lord descended into hell, something that both we and the Greeks alike believe.”^[3] Thus, when (after Nicaea) others rose up to blaspheme the Spirit, the Church met again in council at Constantinople and expanded the Creed as we profess it today.

Second, while we affirm the Creeds of the Apostles, Nicaea, and Athanasius, they too can be misinterpreted, not unlike the Scriptures themselves. We are not free to affirm these Creeds in a way that is foreign to their framers, which is why the Jerusalem Declaration called on us to respect the Church’s historic and consensual teaching. As we have previously argued, the Church has handed down to us not only a canon of Scripture, but a rule of interpretation.

God Without Passions

We begin with errors regarding our doctrine of God. While we may think there are more urgent errors to attend to given the current state of our Province and Communion, if we cannot agree on our doctrine of God, how will we obey the Apostles’ commands to be of the same mind on other doctrines?^[4] We must go upstream, to the head of all doctrine, and root out error there before we can attend to that which flows from who God is. As E.L. Mascall noted,

“The doctrine of God is the basis upon which all other Christian doctrine rests, any error that has been allowed to creep into a man’s belief about God will distort his understanding of every other Christian truth. If his idea of God is wrong, his idea of Christ will be wrong, since Christ is God incarnate; and his ideas of the Church and the Sacraments will be wrong, since the Church is Christ’s Body and the Sacraments are the instruments of his action upon the human soul.”^[5]

We see an example of misunderstanding the mind of the Church in those who argue that God is subject to passions. For instance, asserting that God is indeed emotional, but not controlled by his emotions.^[6] Often such assertions are grounded in pastoral concern and a desire to show God to be compassionate, but in reality they subject God to change, making him an unreliable source of salvation. In contrast, the first of the Thirty-Nine Articles compels us to confess that God is without body, parts, or passions. This is not a Reformation era principle, but the Patristic consensus. We see this exemplified in John of Damascus when he writes,

“For it is evident that he is incorporeal. For how could that possess body which is infinity, and boundless, and formless, and intangible and invisible, in short, simple and not compound? How could that be immutable which is circumscribed and subject to passion? And how could that be passionless which is composed of elements and is resolved into them again? For combination is the beginning of conflict, and conflict of separation, and separation of dissolution, and dissolution is altogether foreign to God.”^[7]

To speak of a God subject to passions is to affirm the Greco-Roman notion of divinity, a class of being that is feared not due to justice but due to the changing winds of whim. The Scriptures do not speak of God as feeling love, but being love itself.^[8] We are not objects of his affection as he may be moved by us or some other external force, but because he is love. As Hooker affirms, “Anger and mercy are in us as passions; but in him not so.”^[9] Our rejection of passion in God is not to deny his compassion, but to ascribe it to his “property” rather than his subjection to an external influence.^[10]

One God, One Will

We see another common error in those who affirm with Nicaea that God is one in essence but then assert that within this essence there are three centers of consciousness, will, and activity. To confess three wills, three actions in the world, or three consciousnesses is to confess tritheism. This misunderstanding of the Trinity has even been used by bishops in the Church of England to justify differing on doctrine while walking together, as though the Holy Trinity were an exalted group project.^[11]

This is why St. Augustine censures us from speaking of the Trinity analogically as three men sharing one humanity or three statues made from one gold.^[12] Divinity is not a fourth thing in which the persons participate, but rather God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In affirmation of this, the Sixth Ecumenical Council affirmed that there is “one deity, of one nature and substance or essence, so we will profess also that it has one natural will, power, operation, domination, majesty, potency, and glory.”^[13] Thus, we with the Sixth Council profess two wills in our Lord Jesus, the one divine and the other human, the latter of which he submits to his Father as an example to us that we might learn to submit to the one divine will of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.

Without Ceasing to Be What He Was, He Assumed What We Are

Still others attempt to affirm the Creeds, but teach that the Son laid aside his divine attributes during the incarnation in order to live as a man for us. These teach that the Son acted only as a man, relying on the Spirit as we do to work miracles. While this teaching is an attempt to encourage us to follow the example of the Son, these claims either demand that we teach that God can change or that the Son is mutable and thus subordinate to the Father. The former is incompatible with the Scriptures which teach that God does not change,^[14] and the latter is a form of Arianism. In their attempts to resolve the mystery of the Incarnation, those who assert that the Son divested himself of his omniscience, omnipresence, or omnipotence have nullified the divinity of the Son in an opposite error to Apollinaris who nullified his humanity by denying his human soul.

While the Son, as man, was not omniscient, omnipresent, or omnipotent, he did not by his incarnation divest himself of these properties. We would do well to remember that the Son did not assume a particular man, as the third Ecumenical Council condemned Nestorius for teaching, but our humanity. The eternal Son of God is the subject of the incarnation, the object of our faith, and the source of our salvation. As the Apostle testifies, “though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). In his assumption of our poverty he did not cease being rich. How else could he enrich us by his poverty? Rather, with St. John we affirm that in view of his humiliation those whom he made “did not know him” (John 1:10), but those who received him beheld his glory, “the glory as of the only begotten of the Father” (John 1:14).

We must affirm the fullness of the faith, that the Son of God, without ceasing in any way to be divine, emptied himself, not through ceasing to be God, but through the assumption of our nature. As St. Augustine taught,

“‘he emptied himself’ not by changing his own form, but by ‘assuming the form of a slave.’ Nor was he changed or transmuted into a man at the cost of his enduring immutability… [H]e took up humanity in such a way that it was transformed for the better, and it was filled out by him in a manner more inexpressibly excellent and intimate than is a garment when put on by a man… [I]t is necessary for one to understand that the Word was not changed by the assumption of humanity.”^[15]

Why is this critical for us to combat? Either God is without parts or passions as the First of the Thirty-Nine Articles affirms, and therefore cannot disable his attributes like a printer driver, or we need to join the Mormons in their concern that if God can change perhaps he can change for the worse. These notions of Jesus healing people in order to show us how to rely on the Spirit rather than as a declaration of his divinity run contrary to the Scriptures themselves,^[16] as well as the historic teaching of the Church.^[17] Indeed, the Council of Ephesus explicitly condemns those who say “that the one Lord Jesus Christ was glorified by the Spirit, as making use of an alien power that worked through him and as having received from him the power to master unclean spirits and to work divine wonders among people, and does not rather say that it was his own proper Spirit through whom he worked divine wonders.”^[18]

Error, Heresy, and Repentance

As we conclude, it is important to note the distinction between heresy and error. A heretic is one who is obstinate in his rejection of the truth, refusing correction and enduring in error. Perhaps in reading this you have identified areas of your Theology proper or Christology in need of reform. This does not make you a heretic! Each of us is in a constant state of learning to surrender to Christ and his Word. Just as we continue to find sickness in our souls and confess it to Christ and his ministers in order that we might be cleansed by the blood of Jesus and healed of our imperfections, so also we must “take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). When we discover theological error we can, in fact, rejoice, because God has delivered us out of darkness and into his light.

While worshiping in an Anglican church and continually reciting the Nicene Creed, I struggled for years to understand what we meant when we confessed that the Son is eternally begotten of the Father. Rather than spend ten years struggling, I could have simply spent ten minutes reading Athanasius’ First Discourse Against the Arians and discovered what the Bishops of Nicaea meant. We have been given the gift of saints who have pondered this faith deeply before us, so much of their pious thought being preserved in God’s providence through the ages so that we might walk the ancient paths with those who helped trace them out. And we can still imbibe their teaching, heeding the wisdom of Ignatius of Antioch, Irenaeus of Lyons, Athanasius, Chrysostom, Augustine of Hippo, the Venerable Bede, the Damascene, Bernard, Anselm, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Cranmer, Jewel, Hooker, Hall, Ramsey, and others. These, indeed, teach us so that we may learn by them “not to go beyond what is written” (1 Corinthians 4:6) These enjoin us to be Catholic, that is, to hold to the whole deposit of faith, neither adding to it nor subtracting from it, but passing down that which we have received from the beginning. These, together with the Councils of the undivided Church, aid us in the defense of the faith. We ignore them to our peril, to our continued demise into error and heresy.

The call for repentance is not just to the world, but to the Church, that God in his mercy might deliver us from “all false doctrine, heresy, and schism.”^[19] As we continue to submit ourselves to his Word under the tutelage of those saints that have gone on before us and “surrounded us with their fellowship of love and prayer,”^[20] may the Lord grant us grace to cling to that faith once delivered to the saints.

↩︎ (On the Jerusalem Declaration)